Editorial Felipe Pepe at Gamasutra: Why are we abandoning gaming history?

[evdk]

I see that cronyism can be found even on the dex. Why is this article not flagged as advertising?

 

[Ninjerk]

Whose dick did felipepepe suck to get this on the frontpage?!

 

[Drax]

Five trannies and a.... damn I already made that joke....

 

[felipepepe]

I see that cronyism can be found even on the dex. Why is this article not flagged as advertising?

Don't forget to add the disclaimer that I have half the Codex as friend on Steam and played Killing Floor with a lot of them. :3

Codex against the Patriarch.

 

[Zeriel]

Cronyism is meaningless when taken out of context of profit, business, or government. The Codex is a bunch of volunteers who don't get paid, who are enthusiastic about a niche subject. If this is cronyism, so is any review ever written and posted on the front page.

 

[cherry blossom]

Overal, that's also a problem with this gaming industry: It's just glorified toys in the view of the general population. Movies, on the other hand, are enjoyed by kids and grandmas all over the world.

These are still the better days. Games still demand relatively high entry requirements to play games, what with having to install games, run them, fiddle with options, controls and whatnot. The industry won't stop until a goddamn grandma who has never touched a digital device in her life before will be able to play a game without any prior knowledge or experience.

 

[Castanova]

:brofist: for the quality article but even bigger :brofist: for that book you're working on. Somehow I missed that it even existed!

 

[Servo]

Article is amazing felipepepe.

Unfortunately trends are shaped by young people who will never read it

Edit: wait who's Patrick Steward?

 

[Zdzisiu]

Article is amazing felipepepe.

Unfortunately trends are shaped by young people who will never read it

Edit: wait who's Patrick Steward?

Its Sir Patrick Steward for you, you uncultured swine!
Also, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, as you may know him.

 

[crawlkill]

I suppose it's because older games often have very weak interfaces, are sometimes difficult to run on new machines and take a lot longer to complete than it does to watch a movie. But it's absurd to say people have forgotten. The internet's full of retrospectives on old games. I'm sure you can find YouTube playthroughs of any given late-80s early-90s game you wanted. And that's a way people are more likely to want to experience them--as audience members. That's the fundamental difference between film and gaming. You're not in the audience. It's a lot easier to sit through something primitive and weird as an audience member than as the one interacting with it, particularly if the person you're watching play it actually does know what he's doing and doesn't have all the same pointless confusion you'd experience in his place.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

I think any media is not excluded from this problem. Movies didn't start with potemkin they were waaaay before but we simply either don't have actually them anymore or we simply forgot about them.

With media mature comes need for archiving older important stuff.

Well, most silent movies 16 mm were being thrown into a bin after cinemas stopped showing them. There were mostly one shot works, nobody though about archiving them, so more than 90% of silent movies are lost.

 

[Darth Slaughter]

Article is amazing felipepepe.

Unfortunately trends are shaped by young people who will never read it

Edit: wait who's Patrick Steward?

Its Sir Patrick Steward for you, you uncultured swine!
Also, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, as you may know him.

Who's Sir Patrick Steward? Successor of William Shadner?

 

[Perkel]

which is case also for any other media like books and frankly it is not only about media but all things in life.

As humans we feel need to keep something safe when it reaches point where it creates part of who we are. And the more people enjoy particular thing the faster that need is developed.

Secondly there is importance category. People don't want to store bad stuff. For every Mozart there were ton of shitty composers. For every Picasso there were ton of noname shitty artists. Same thing with games.

 

[Servo]

That's the fundamental difference between film and gaming. You're not in the audience. It's a lot easier to sit through something primitive and weird as an audience member than as the one interacting with it, particularly if the person you're watching play it actually does know what he's doing and doesn't have all the same pointless confusion you'd experience in his place.

Actually this is a really good point. Not to mention classic movies tend to be under two hours, which can be viewed in a single evening, whereas classic CRPGs can take months to years for an adult to complete that has other shit to do with his free time.

However it's not really necessary to beat most of these games, and every video game "enthusiast" should at least try them.

 

[Infinitron]

Article is amazing felipepepe.

Unfortunately trends are shaped by young people who will never read it

Edit: wait who's Patrick Steward?

Its Sir Patrick Steward for you, you uncultured swine!
Also, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, as you may know him.

You mean Jean-Luc Picart.

 

[tuluse]

Article is amazing felipepepe.

Unfortunately trends are shaped by young people who will never read it

Edit: wait who's Patrick Steward?

Its Sir Patrick Steward for you, you uncultured swine!
Also, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, as you may know him.

You mean Jean-Luc Picart.

Right, the captain after James Diberius Kirk

 

[Deuce Traveler]

Tags: CRPG Book Project

Cinema is over a century old, yet it’s expected for any decent critic or self-proclaimed enthusiast to have a knowledge ranging from ancient classics such as Battleship Potemkin and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to recent movies only shown at foreign festivals. If you tried to write about cinema having watched only post-90’s movies and one or two older Disney animations, you would be nothing more than a joke. Renting Citizen Kane once, or the fact that you grew up watching movies, aren't remarkable achievements in a serious industry.

So how can we ask others to respect games as art, when even gamers and industry professionals don’t bother to learn about its history?

​

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[felipepepe]

I suppose it's because older games often have very weak interfaces, are sometimes difficult to run on new machines and take a lot longer to complete than it does to watch a movie. But it's absurd to say people have forgotten. The internet's full of retrospectives on old games. I'm sure you can find YouTube playthroughs of any given late-80s early-90s game you wanted.

Yes, there will always be monks preserving knowledge, but you can't say that our past is still remembered because a guy in Ukraine uploaded a video of a old game and got 5 views. The real issue is the public awareness.

In movies we have critics that have an encyclopedic knowledge of the 100 years of cinema, you have courses dedicated to movie history, you have publications and festivals devoted to their past. There's an effort to keep movie history in people's mind. Last year I watched a public projection of Nosferatu right in the middle of the busiest avenue of São Paulo. Yet when you look at the gaming industry as a whole, self-proclaimed "hardcore" gamers don't want to play older titles and that even the supposed "experts" that report on the industry never played or report on them.

And that goes against all the discourse being made by these same people on how games are art, how they should be respected and be treated as culture.

 

[Athelas]

With games there is obviously the added factor of constant technological progress. Most people probably believe that older games are outdated and therefore only of limited 'merit' (or none at all).

 

[Servo]

And that goes against all the discourse being made by these same people on how games are art, how they should be respected and be treated as culture.

They want their Doritos and they want to eat it too.

With games there is obviously the added factor of constant technological progress. Most people probably believe that older games are outdated and therefore only of limited 'merit' (or none at all).

Because with movies there is no technological advancement?

 

[crawlkill]

And that goes against all the discourse being made by these same people on how games are art, how they should be respected and be treated as culture.

Games from the late 80s and early 90s, depending on form, are often more comparable to films like A Man Sneezes or A Train Goes By than they are to Nosferatu or Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. The reality is that no one but film scholars DOES care about those ultra-early, ultra-primitive forays. In the era of Nosferatu, I doubt if anyone was sitting down to watch A Man Sneezes and going "what a fascinating cultural event." Early gaming, like early cinema, was essentially all about how exciting the format was, much more than it was about the content produced.

That becomes interesting in retrospect, once a form has become completely standardized and normal--today, it's bizarre and kind of fascinating to watch a fifteen second clip of a man sneezing and think, "This once wowed audiences." But we're nowhere near that era in history yet. We're far too close to the birth of "sophisticated" gaming and gaming is still entirely too much in flux for us to look at those early games and say "man, how could anyone ever have been entertained by this?" We're very much close enough to understand how they were entertaining; we're also close enough that most people without nostalgia find them cryptic, badly designed and boring. We'd need much more distance for it to have the novelty value of high weirdness.

I think having one Ukranian guy posting a YouTube video about Fountain of Dreams or whatever is very much in line with even our modern interest in parallel examples of ultra-early cinema, and is probably even closer to the amount of interest there was in A Man Sneezes twenty years after its time.

 

[Athelas]

With games there is obviously the added factor of constant technological progress. Most people probably believe that older games are outdated and therefore only of limited 'merit' (or none at all).

Because with movies there is no technological advancement?

There is, but obviously nowhere near the same extent as is the case with video games. The most significant ones were the jump from silent to sound and black-and-white to color, both of which happened more than half a century ago.

 

[Infinitron]

And that goes against all the discourse being made by these same people on how games are art, how they should be respected and be treated as culture.

Games from the late 80s and early 90s, depending on form, are often more comparable to films like A Man Sneezes or A Train Goes By than they are to Nosferatu or Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. The reality is that no one but film scholars DOES care about those ultra-early, ultra-primitive forays. In the era of Nosferatu, I doubt if anyone was sitting down to watch A Man Sneezes and going "what a fascinating cultural event." Early gaming, like early cinema, was essentially all about how exciting the format was, much more than it was about the content produced.

That becomes interesting in retrospect, once a form has become completely standardized and normal--today, it's bizarre and kind of fascinating to watch a fifteen second clip of a man sneezing and think, "This once wowed audiences." But we're nowhere near that era in history yet. We're far too close to the birth of "sophisticated" gaming and gaming is still entirely too much in flux for us to look at those early games and say "man, how could anyone ever have been entertained by this?" We're very much close enough to understand how they were entertaining; we're also close enough that most people without nostalgia find them cryptic, badly designed and boring. We'd need much more distance for it to have the novelty value of high weirdness.

I think having one Ukranian guy posting a YouTube video about Fountain of Dreams or whatever is very much in line with even our modern interest in parallel examples of ultra-early cinema, and is probably even closer to the amount of interest there was in A Man Sneezes twenty years after its time.

If Fountain of Dreams is A Man Sneezes then what is Pong?

 

[Servo]

I think having one Ukranian guy posting a YouTube video about Fountain of Dreams or whatever is very much in line with even our modern interest in parallel examples of ultra-early cinema, and is
probably even closer to the amount of interest there was in A Man Sneezes twenty years after its time.

By the time PoR came out I'd say video games were much less experimental and more comparable to Nosferatu, as opposed to Pong or something.

You're right that nobody cares though.

With games there is obviously the added factor of constant technological progress. Most people probably believe that older games are outdated and therefore only of limited 'merit' (or none at all).

Because with movies there is no technological advancement?

There is, but obviously nowhere near the same extent as is the case with video games. The most significant ones were the jump from silent to sound and black-and-white to color, both of which happened more than half a century ago.

orly?

 

[felipepepe]

Games from the late 80s and early 90s, depending on form, are often more comparable to films like A Man Sneezes or A Train Goes By than they are to Nosferatu or Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.

When talking about Alakabeth or dnd I understand that, but when we go to Lands of Lore, Daggerfall, Ultima VI and the likes, that's ridiculous.